Certain types of data storage media may become less reliable with use. For example, storage media may wear out or degrade over time, with each program, erase, or the like. Each physical storage location may have a limited number of writes before the location wears out and is no longer usable.
If a storage controller provides wear-leveling for physical storage locations, however, some type of mapping must be maintained between logical addresses and physical storage locations. Metadata for such mappings can incur significant processing overhead and storage capacity. As the size of the storage device increases, the amount of mapping metadata also increases. Accessing mapping metadata can also increase latency of storage requests.